STROHLTOPIA

Edit: I added a couple additional thoughts about the narrative, marked by  an *

Some preliminaries:

I think there are at least three levels of interpretation that need to be attended to.  They don’t strictly supervene on each other: an interpretation at one of the three levels is compatible with multiple interpretations at the other levels.  But they are not totally independent: interpretation at each level does bear upon the other two.

The three levels are:

• The 1990 Level: the narrative of the original Twin Peaks series, taken at face value, and the extension of this narrative in TP: The Return, which I take to be imbedded within but not identical to the new series.
• The Lost Highway Level: I call it this not because of direct connections with the movie Lost Highway, but rather because of certain general features that TP: The Return has in common with Lost Highway. Lynch’s works that involve a multiple worlds metaphysics include at least the unproduced screenplay Ronnie Rocket, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks: The Return.  Of these, only Mulholland Dr. explicitly clarifies that one world is the real world while the other world is a dream world.  Lynch directly shows us a character going to sleep and then waking up, indicating that what falls between is her dream, and then gives us a concrete basis for understanding the dream as wish fulfillment (he does also boggle up the “real world” in various ways and introduce some ambiguities, but the interpretation of the film is clear enough, especially relative to Lost Highway and Inland Empire).  Lost Highway is arguably the film that most fully confounds the question of reality vs. dream.  There is an available reading that is parallel to Mulholland Dr., where the character murders his wife out of sexual jealousy and then enters into a fantasy where he is a virile young buck who saves her from exploitative circumstances.  But the film goes very far out of its way to confound this interpretation and leave us with no easy basis for separating reality from dream.  I think that TP: The Return pulls a Lost Highway: there is some reason for thinking that the entire 1990 Level is a dream, and then there is also some reason for thinking that everything outside the 1990 Level is a dream, and there is also reason for thinking that neither is fully a dream nor fully not a dream.  Audrey’s entire arc, for instance, as well as the “has anyone seen Billy?!” diner scene and everything that happens at the Road House beg to be taken at the Lost Highway Level.   “We are like the dreamer who dreams, and lives inside the dream.  But who is the dreamer?”  That’s an open question.
• The Meta-Artistic Level: One thing that I think is happening in TP: The Return is that Lynch is summing up his career and revisiting the obsessions that permeate his work. My other posts have noted clear references to or connections with his other work.   Here’s the clearest way to make the case that this level needs to be attended to: the recurring use of the abbreviation “RR.”  Ronnie Rocket, Norma’s RR Diner, Rancho Rosa Production Company (Lynch and Frost’s company), Rancho Rosa Estates (the development where Dougie and Janey-E live).   I mentioned in an early post that my brother noted a connection that resonated for me between Dougie and M. Hulot.  Lynch has explicitly stated that Tati was a major influence for Ronnie Rocket, and it’s very clear that the “electricity as a means of transportation between worlds” trope from Ronnie Rocket has reverberated through Lynch’s career, most saliently in Lost Highway and TP: The Return.  At the Meta-Artistic Level, I think the 1990 Level is a stand in for his creative work, and the Lost Highway Level is a stand in for the practice of transcendental meditation that largely constitutes his creative process (the untethered level, which ideas emerge from and ultimately resolve back into).   As a basic guiding thought, within the 1990 Level think of Cooper’s quest to set things right as standing in for Lynch’s artistic obsessions, and (at the Meta-Artistic Level) think of the desolate final episode, where we step soundly outside of the 1990 level, as a melancholy acknowledgement that these obsessions must ultimately go unquenched.  Cooper can’t set things right.  We leave Cooper and Laura locked in an eternal still life, where she’s whispering in his ear, beckoning him to try harder.   NB, I also think the Meta-Artistic Level is reflected in the appearance of Monica Belluci as herself in a dream of the character played by Lynch himself.  “We are like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream.  But who is the dreamer?”  At the Meta-Artistic Level, the dreamer is David Lynch, and also perhaps us, his audience.

I do not think there is a consistent, exhaustive interpretation of the 1990 Level available.  I have seen a few people complain that they were dissatisfied with the lack of answers and resolutions—not many though: it seems like most people loved the conclusion.  The people who make this complaint think that the 1990 Level is the only level, or at least fail to recognize that it is superseded by the Lost Highway Level.  The 1990 Level is like the central Balthazar Getty narrative in Lost Highway, sandwiched between the Bill Pullman bookends.  It is the primary narrative we engage with, but it is imbedded in a larger structure.  In both cases, elements of inconsistency or unreality within the imbedded narrative both signal its status as non-reality and open up connections with the larger structure it is imbedded in (both ways the larger structure intrudes into it and ways that it intrudes into the larger structure).

The thread that I am most interested in picking up from the 1990 Level and into the Lost Highway Level is the final arc of Diane and Cooper.  We never met Diane in the original series, and she is replaced by a tulpa for most of TP: The Return.   The real Diane emerges from Naido in episode 17.  I can’t remember where I read it but someone pointed out that ‘Naido’ is ‘O Dian’ backwards (and Janey-E got the ‘e’).  In the glorious central scene, after Freddy smashes the BOB orb, I take the overlay of Cooper’s face with the action of the scene to signal the encroaching collapse of 1990 Level into the Lost Highway Level.  “We live inside a dream.”

Naido is brought over to Cooper and they touch hands, initiating her transition into Diane.  When we finally see Laura Dern, Cooper cracks a huge grin and walks over to her.  They immediately kiss like reunited lovers at the airport, with no concern for anyone else being in the room (and the whole menagerie, Jim Belushi included, is there).  Cooper asks, “Do you remember everything?”  “Yes.”  They seem content and resolved.  Cooper tells all his friends, “I hope I see all of you again.”  The superimposed Cooper announces, “we live inside a dream.”  Full Lost Highway Level achieved.  Fade to Cooper, Gordon, and Diane walking through a black space with Cooper’s face still superimposed, looking either confused or concerned or some other hard to pin down emotion (brilliantly ambiguous acting from MacLachlan).  The three of them reach a door (I think  in the basement of the sheriff’s station) that leads to the Convenience Store.   Cooper walks through: “I’ll see you at the curtain call.”  This leads him to Jeffries, who in turn opens a gate to the past, where he prevents Laura’s murder, fulfilling Leland’s request from the Black Lodge that he save Laura.

Edit: Twin Peaks let me hungry for more ambitious large scale works, so I’ve been working through Jacques Rivette (more on that in future posts).  I just watched Celine and Julie Go Boating (clearly a huge influence on Lynch, especially Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks), and there seems to be some reason to connect Cooper’s saving Laura with Celine and Julie’s saving Madlyn.  This would seem particularly relevant to the meta-artistic level of interpretation.  In Celine and Julie Go Boating, the events within the gothic mansion are a fiction within a fiction, and they keep replaying until finally C&J prevent Madlyn from being murdered, at which point the boundaries between the different levels of fiction break down and Madlyn joins C&J in the “real world,” as do the other Gothic characters, though frozen in a tableau.  This doesn’t obviously correlate with anything that happens in Twin Peaks after Laura is saved, but there seems to be enough of a connection to warrant further consideration.

The suggestion that has resonated for me the most here is that Diane is coming from the timeline where Laura didn’t die, and therefore Cooper never went to Twin Peaks and the two of them had a love affair.   Diane’s tulpa (in its moment of clarity) has already told us that she and Cooper kissed only once, which is part of what leads me to believe that she’s coming from an alternate timeline.  Her reunion kiss with Cooper is a kiss between people who fuck each other, not between people who have only kissed once before.  We must remember that Laura was created in the White Lodge as a counterpoint to the Mother’s spewing forth of all the evil spirits in episode 8.  At the 1990 Level in Twin Peaks: The Return, Judy is still a force in the world but it has been kept at bay.  Perhaps Laura’s death was a part of that.  In a world where Laura didn’t die, things may get really, really bad.  And perhaps Diane and Cooper make a plan in that world to cross over to the 1990 World at the point where Cooper goes back in time to save Laura and intervene.   He saves her again (otherwise they couldn’t have become lovers and made the plan and they couldn’t be there), but this time they proceed with a further plan, referred to as “Two Birds with One Stone.”  I did a little googling and there is apparently some reference to summoning the Mother (who is either connected with or identical to Judy) through sex rituals in Mark Frost’s Secret History book (which I haven’t read and wouldn’t base an interpretation on, but I am happy to take this nugget to support an interpretation that has an independent basis).    The notion that sex can summon the Mother/Experiment/Judy is certainly supported by the wonderful scene in the opening episode where the guy who watches the cube has sex with the girl who brings the lattes and we see the Experiment in the cube before it brutalizes them.   The sex scene between Cooper and Diane is one of the greatest scenes Lynch ever filmed.  I’ve seen it suggested that Diane’s covering Cooper’s face is explained by the fact that his doppelganger raped her.  On my reading, she is from a timeline where this didn’t happen.  I watched the scene closely several times and I don’t read her pain and her behavior as signaling PTSD.  She loves him.  She wants him.  She feels pleasure.  She kisses him even as she covers his face.  She also stares blankly into space, punctuating her vacant stare with grimaces of acute dread.  The two of them have already acknowledged that they should kiss (and enjoy it) now because things will be different once they cross over.   I think what’s happening is that she knows that she’s literally fucking him into another dimension.  She will emerge from the coital interlude as Linda, and he will be Richard to her, not Cooper.  She knows she’s destroying the version of herself that loves Cooper and destroying the Cooper that she loves.  She can’t stand to look at his face, but she also feels driven to express her love to him with these fleeting moments.

So what the Two Birds with One Stone plan entails is that Cooper and Diane somehow use this sex ritual to transition into an alternate dimension.  (edit for aftethought: perhaps Mr. C’s assault of Audrey and Diane is directly related to the sex ritual. Either he is trying to enact the ritual with them or he is trying to close Cooper off from doing so.)

David Auerbach, picking up from another commentator, has suggested in this fascinating post that the world containing Odessa and Twin Peaks that we enter in episode 18 is trap developed by the White Lodge to catch and destroy Judy.  That’s one way to take it.  I see another, though: what if this alternate world IS Judy.  Jeffries shows Cooper the symbol that Mr. C earlier pointed to and said “This is what I want” and refers to it as the place where Cooper wants to go.  Perhaps the reason there is a dead body in Carrie’s house is that Judy is trying to hide her from the Blue Rose Task Force.  She does explicitly say that she would normally avoid the FBI.

*Edit: a different thought: perhaps when the Fireman says in the first episode “it is in our house now,” he means that Judy is in the Richard and Linda world.   Perhaps Judy has taken up residence in the white lodge’s domain and has corrupted it and stayed to harvest the garmonbozia.  This is supported by the desolation of the world and the fact that the diner is called Judy’s.  (continued at the end of the post)

Tangent: What did Mr. C want?  I don’t have an answer, but I see two possibilities: he wanted to stop Cooper’s plan, or he wanted to somehow connect in a deeper way with Judy, perhaps by integrating himself into it or (the inverse) by integrating it into himself.  Perhaps he wanted to go into the Richard and Linda dimension and kill Carrie.   This requires some weird assumptions about the way the time travel loops work but these assumptions don’t seem out of bounds.

Returning to the main strand: so if the place where Cooper goes actually is Judy, some version of Laura is trapped there.  This is a version that Cooper saved from being murdered by her father, but who then somehow became trapped in another life in the dismal alternate version of Odessa, TX.   So what is Cooper’s goal in bringing this version of Laura to the home where she was raped repeatedly by her father and otherwise tormented?   We can infer that it is the final stage of Two Birds with One Stone.  When they are about to walk away, she looks back at the house.  He asks her, “what year is this?”  She thinks for a moment.  She hears Leland’s voice (or is it Sarah’s?) faintly calling, “Laaaauuuuuuura” and lets out a scream for the ages.   Electricity flashes.  Everything goes black.  Show’s over.   Epilogue: she’s whispering  into Cooper’s ear.

The implication seems to be that Laura’s recollection somehow destroys Judy: the alternate world they are in.  In the piece linked above, Auerbach suggests that it’s a garmonbozia overload.  I think that’s plausible.  Recalling Laura’s origin as the White Lodge’s response to the events following from Trinity, it could be the case that Laura was from the beginning a bomb meant to destroy Judy, if only the right set of circumstances could align.  These circumstances are oblique, but I think it’s significant that Judy has trapped her in such a way as to hide from her who she really is (she’s living as “Carrie”).  Also notice that she’s got a dead body in her house and she explicitly says that she would normally avoid FBI agents– perhaps a way in which Judy is trying to hide her from the blue rose task force.  Somehow or other, perhaps through garmonbozia overload, the key to destroying Judy is Laura becoming conscious of herself as Laura within Judy.

What are the two birds, and what is the one stone?  I don’t know.  I think we have to address that question firmly at the Lost Highway Level.  If Lynch wanted it to be clear, that would have been easy to achieve.  One thing that I think is clear is that Cooper doesn’t find exactly what he expects in the world where Laura is Carrie.  Things don’t go according to plan.  Is it a success or is it a failure?  He certainly doesn’t save Laura, but does he willfully sacrifice her or is it rather that something goes wrong and the ending is both a success (Judy is destroyed) and a failure (Laura is destroyed)?  Are Judy and Laura the two birds while he is the stone?  Are he and Judy the birds while Laura is (supposed to be) the stone?  I’m not convinced that things worked out as he planned.  He did, after all, hope to see everyone again at the curtain call.   I don’t think these questions have definite answers.  They must be embraced in their ambiguity.

*(Edit: I do think it’s ambiguous but the best I’ve come up with, riffing on the Auerbach story,  is that the two birds are the White Lodge and Black Lodge and the stone is Laura.    If “it is in our house now” means that Judy is in the white lodge’s domain, perhaps the idea is to seek a Pyrrhic victory: detonate Judy through a garmonbozia overload, sacrificing the white lodge in the process)

First of all: LAURA DERN!!!  I don’t think I need to elaborate on that.

When I checked in with my brother last night after we had both seen the episode,  we realized that we had taken the ending very differently.   I haven’t read any recaps or commentary yet, so I’m not sure how others took it.  He thought that Audrey’s arc was a Mulholland Dr. or Lost Highway-esque dream narrative, whereas I thought that the final revelation was that she is a tulpa.  So far, we know that Diane and Sarah Palmer are both dark tulpas (as was Dougie before Coop’s return), and the Laura in the black lodge is a light tulpa.   What I got from that glorious, glorious Diane scene was that when a tulpa has been made of an individual, that individual’s consciousness is trapped within and can emerge under certain conditions.  For Diane, seeing Evil Coop’s text somehow enabled her real consciousness to take over briefly.  It seems that when the Sarah Palmer tulpa was in the liquor store and heard voices in her head, what she was happening was the real Sarah Palmer was struggling to come out and cry for help.  My reasoning for thinking Audrey is a tulpa is twofold: we now know for sure that she was raped by Evil Coop, and so it sounds like he did the same thing to her that he did to Diane.  Also, I thought that last image was a representation of the real Audrey’s dormant consciousness flirting with awareness.  I assume that the Sarah Palmer tulpa was actually made by Leland Palmer and not by Evil Coop, which would explain a lot about how she behaved in the original series (in particular, why she wasn’t more aware and protective of her daughter).  I also see my brother’s point though: there are lots of reasons to think that the Audrey’s Dance scene at the roadhouse was the culmination of a Lynchian dream.

In any case, I hope people who have been impatient about Dougie and angry about what’s happened to Audrey realize now that they should have trusted Lynch.  Even if you don’t like Dougie (which I still can’t comprehend), this payoff absolutely depended on the long development leading up to it.   “Dougie sure is talking with a lot of assurance!”   I’m just bubbling over with joy thinking about Cooper’s loving goodbye to his new family.   “I’m your dad.”   And I never would have guessed that Lynch would resurrect James Belushi so magnificently.  Inspired casting.

The Jerry Horne payoff!  The shoot out!

The contrast with the abiding trashiness of Game of Thrones actually made me appreciate Twin Peaks more.  It was like having an 80 minute fast food appetizer before being served the best entrée of your life.

Amazon Prime

Breakdown

This is a 90’s genre masterpiece.   It’s a highway update of The Lady Vanishes, with a great Kurt Russell performance.

Suspiria

Horror fans already know this one.  It’s the most iconic of Argento’s earlier works.  Don’t expect much of a narrative: this is all about mood, elaborately staged deaths, and one of the greatest soundtracks of all time.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 40^th Anniversary

If you haven’t seen the 2014 restoration of the greatest horror film ever made, you’re in for a treat.  It preserves the raw, grindhouse aesthetic but really pops off the screen.  Many previously washed out visual details have become legible, and the surround sound mix is more immersive than ever and highlights the incredible score.

Netflix

The Fury

After De Palma’s success with Carrie, he was thought of as “the telekinesis guy” and was asked to helm this Kirk Douglas project.  It’s a very different beast than Carrie: it integrates the telekinesis theme with a Jamesonian paranoid geopolitical aesthetic.   It’s a pretty divisive movie, often considered by De Palma fans to be one of his best, but also widely disliked.  I personally can’t relate *at all* to anyone who dislikes it.  It’s an overwhelming pleasure for me.  Pauline Kael famously wrote about the ending, “One can imagine Welles, Peckinpah, Scorsese, and Spielberg still stunned, bowing to the ground, choking with laughter.”

Hellraiser

I assume most people have seen this, but this assumption has often proven incorrect.  Definitely, definitely, definitely see it if you haven’t.  It’s lightning in a bottle, with an alternate S&M dimension and no sympathetic characters.  Clive Barker’s three masterpieces  (this, Nightbreed, and Lord of Illusions) are unlike anything else in the cinematic horror genre.  His imagination is truly one of a kind.

Late Phases

Old-fashioned werewolf movie, with a blind military veteran as the protagonist.  I love it. With its legit practical effects (!) it stands head and shoulders above all the shitty CGI werewolf movies that we’ve been inundated with since CGI became a thing.

The African Queen

Back in the days before streaming, I used to watch this pretty much every time it was on Turner Classic Movies.  You’ve got salty old riverboat captain Humphrey Bogart and overbearing church lady Katherine Hepburn, you’ve got a WWI adventure story, and you’ve got a classic screen romance.  I pressed play the second I saw that it had appeared on Netflix, and it was as comforting as ever.

Cold in July

Trigger warning! Super dark, extremely compelling, twisted, unusual revenge movie starring Dexter and the late, great Sam Shepard in one of his last film performances.

Hulu

Altered States

Ken Russell’s hallucinatory 1980 freakout has aged well.  This is one of the boldest, most original studio films of the era.

Kaboom

Latter day Greg Araki pastiche.  Really fun and super weird. It’s hard to say too much without giving away plot points, but it’s a like a combination postmodern college sex comedy and cult sci-fi sorta thing.

Pontypool

Weird as fuck high concept chamber horror.  An apocalyptic zombie virus spreads through… certain uses of language.

Ghost Rider

Wildly underrated.  If you feel like freebasing some Nicolas Cage, this is your movie.  The sequel, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, is less campy but also great.  It has less Cage amazingness but Neveldine and Taylor’s virtuoso kinetic style is on full display.

The Mangler

Undervalued Tobe Hooper classic with a delightful Robert Englund performance.  Hooper’s manic-hysterical aesthetic plus a demonic industrial laundry machine.

The Witches

A damn kids’ movie, directed by legendary avant garde British auteur Nicolas Roeg.  I loved it as a kid and I love it even more today.  I’m not a parent so I don’t really know but it seems to me like the shift towards sanitized, feel good kid’s movies is an awful development.  So many movies I watched as a kid gave me nightmares and kept me up late nervously wondering might be in the closet, and it was wonderful.  This was definitely one of them.

Buried

Ultra tight high concept thriller. Ryan Reynolds buried alive!

In the Mouth of Madness

John Carpenter’s Lovecraft-inspired surreal mindfuck.  It holds up very well 20+ years later.  This one should be accessible to people who don’t generally love horror.

13 Assassins

Takashi Miike genre extravaganza.  One of two remakes he did of 60’s samurai movies.   A team of 13 elite samurai confronts an army of hundreds to assassinate the shogun’s sadistic half-bother.   It has that Miike touch of ultra-depravity, but it’s also a rousing and  immensely enjoyable few-against-many action spectacle in the tradition of The Seven Samurai. 

Frustration is endemic to the television serial.  One of the great joys of the serial is the way the viewer’s interest is propelled forward by cliffhangers and unanswered questions.  We all know the feeling of “oh shit, there’s a new Breaking Bad tonight!”  There’s tremendous pleasure in the cycle of being frustrated by a cliffhanger, having thoughts of anticipation building towards the next episode, and finally sitting down for the big revelation.  Sometimes a show will tease you: postpone the awaited event or answer a question with another question.  Skillful play with audience expectations can be deployed to great effect.

Lynch has made this dynamic a theme of Twin Peaks: The Return, and in part 12 it reaches a fever pitch.  A brief perusal of the internet indicates that a lot of people couldn’t stand it.  I’m not surprised.  He takes it so far that it reminds me of Haneke’s Funny Games.  Funny Games is an anti-thriller that aims to punish its audience for their blood-thirsty genre expectations.  It shows us none of the action but all of the suffering.  There’s a 7+ minute scene of someone who’s been shot bleeding out on the floor.  I deliberately went to see the English-language version of Funny Games primetime Friday night at the big multiplex with as large a crowd as possible, because the audience reaction is the whole point.  I was not disappointed.  During the above mentioned 7+ minute scene, complete strangers in the audience started fighting with each other openly.  One guy stood up and threatened a group of teenagers that he would “stick all their heads up their asses.” Well played, Haneke.

In an analogous way, part 12 was anti-television.  God, where to begin.   The episode was entitled “Let’s rock,” which is an iconic line from the original series (spoken by The Arm).  Multiple storylines have built a good head of steam and we are getting close to October 1^st in the show’s timeline, when we have been led to believe that the shit will hit the fan.  I think everyone expected an eventful episode.  I’ve even heard that Lynch and Frost deliberately leaked that this would be the most remarkable episode yet (someone leaked this, but we don’t know who for sure).  What we got instead wasn’t merely an audience tease; it was an all-out assault on our expectations.   The clearest way to make this case is to consider the way Audrey was reintroduced.  Sherilyn Fenn is listed in the show’s cast; we knew she would show up sooner or later.  I had seen various online comments this last week: “We’re getting down to the wire and so many things still need to happen!  So many characters haven’t even shown up yet!”   There was a lot of hope circulating that maybe Audrey will finally appear.  The show has been brutal about withholding gratification.  Basically none of the fan favorites from the original series are seeing heavy play, and when they do show up, it’s not in the way the audience wants them to.  When we finally get to hear Coop say “damn good cherry pie,” it’s overwhelmingly sad.  Audrey’s reintroduction goes beyond withholding, and approaches open hostility.  Lynch brought her back in the most abrasive way possible.  Her hen-pecked husband Charlie sits over a pile of work and complains about being sleepy while she angrily berates him because he’s not being helpful in tracking down her missing lover, Billy.  We don’t know any of the characters mentioned.  The scene goes on FOREVER.  Charlie makes a phone call (rotary dial, of course), there’s a big info dump, and we only hear his side of it.  He says “unbelievable, what you’re telling me!”, but then refuses to explain what he was told.  Audrey has a conniption.  My favorite line is when she yells at him to look in his crystal ball and find out where Billy is, and he replies, “Come on, Audrey, you know I don’t have a crystal ball.”   She emphasizes “You have no balls!  That’s why I’m in love with Billy!  That’s why I’m FUCKING Billy!”   And then when we do finally get to the roadhouse (where Audrey intended to look for Billy), instead of some kind of exposition of what’s up with Audrey, we switch to two entirely new characters talking about other characters we haven’t met.    I was cackling at this point.  Again: my reading is that he’s taken a structural feature of television serials in general and blown it up to the point of absurdity.  We love to be teased a little by a good TV show.  Lynch takes it past the breaking point several times over.

Another great scene involves Lynch himself and French actress Berenice Marlohe (she was a Bond girl in Skyfall).  Lynch often gets accused of various forms of misogyny.  I think that these critiques are ill-founded, but I’m not interested in litigating the issue right now.  A frequent accusation is that he likes to dress women up like 50’s pin ups and ogle them.  In this scene, he literally ogles Marlohe (in a pin up getup) for two solid minutes.  As for the episode as a whole, in this scene Lynch is really aggressively leaning into his critics.  Oh, you don’t like that?  You mean you don’t like it when I do THIS?!

Negative emotions often figure positively in aesthetic experiences.  Sadness and grief for tragedy, fear and disgust for horror, etc.  I’ve argued that we should understand these negative emotions as elements imbedded within complex aesthetic experiences, and that an overall aesthetic experience can be attractive partly in virtue of one or more of its elements being painful or otherwise aversive.  I think we can understand the frustrations of Twin Peaks according to this model.  Frustration is an unpleasant emotion, but imbedded in the right context, it can be quite pleasant.   Television ordinarily plays with frustration by teasing our expectations.  I’ve been engaging with David Lynch’s art since I was like 12 years old (thanks, Dad).   Part of the pleasure of approaching the new Twin Peaks episodes for me is that I still really, truly have no idea what the fuck he’s going to do.  True aesthetic surprise is an exhilarating experience that’s all too hard to come by now that we’ve passed through the postmodern singularity.   Last night’s episode really, truly surprised me.  The frustration that the narrative engendered wasn’t ultimately unpleasant for me, because it fed into this feeling of exhilarating surprise.  Like, “THAT’S HOW YOU’RE GONNA BRING AUDREY BACK!  OMG!”    I get the sense that people with overly rigid expectations didn’t share my enjoyment, and I think that’s part of the point as well.  Much like Haneke, Lynch is showing open hostility to a certain sort of audience.   He’s punishing those looking for nostalgia.

I’ve had mixed feelings about HBO’s takeover of creative control of Game of Thrones since the beginning of season 6.  On the one hand, Martin is in most respects a mediocre fantasy writer and the show is generally much better than the books.  He writes great characters, but he falls prey to the classic middle-books fantasy trap of burning through plot too fast and then loading up on filler (too many new, uninteresting characters, hundreds of pages of people being on the way to places).   I’m also not a big fan of ultra-gritty fantasy, with constant talk of hard cocks and so on.  I’ll take Robin Hobb and Brandon Sanderson over Martin any day of the week.

But on the other hand, the special appeal of HBO’s Game of Thrones does depend to a large extent on Martin’s influence– in particular, his constant subversion of narrative expectations.  Killing main characters, people on a revenge quest being killed before they achieve revenge, villains falling to other villains rather than to heroes, etc.  That’s what makes Game of Thrones what it Is.   The show has a unique ability to make you feel truly terrible, and that’s 90% of its appeal.

I really did not like season 6 very much.   It was too crowd pleasing, too readily satisfying.  It was like they finally were off Martin’s leash and the first thing they did was distance themselves from everything that made the show distinct.  I hated, hated, hated the way they brought back Jon Snow.  It was like “oh you thought your favorite character was dead, PSYCHE!  He’s fine!”   It didn’t even make sense.  All of a sudden Davos, whose primary character traits are an excess of caution and an abiding distrust of black magic, and who barely knows Jon Snow, is all gung ho in favor of using black magic to bring him back.    I’m not necessarily against the idea of bringing him back– indeed I’m sure Martin planned  something along those lines– but a cardinal rule of fantasy and horror fiction is that if someone is brought back from the dead via black magic they are never the same.  They carry the taint of death with them in some way.  In the HBO version, it’s like he’s immediately back to his old self, no harm done.  The only point I see of him having died in the first place is that his resurrection feeds into some kind of chosen one narrative relating to the Lord of Light.  But c’mon, TAINT OF DEATH, PLEASE.

This week, however, Game of Thrones became Game of Thrones again.  That devastating sea battle, beautifully timed to interrupt a kiss between fan favorites and disappoint the shit out of everyone chomping at the bit for some steamy action, was a true Game of Thrones turn.   And then Theon’s moment of cowardice, after all the work the show has done to rebuild respect for the character, was brilliant.  The action film-making was on par with the best battle sequences we’ve seen from the show.  I also really appreciated the body horror in the earlier Samwell/Jorah scene.  Welcome back, Thrones.

From the first book of the series (which I read well before the show was produced), it’s clear that the ultimate conflict will be between the old magics of fire and ice.  The dragons vs. the white walkers.  The series is predicated on a structural irony, where the Shakespearean machinations within Westeros are the narrative focus but we are constantly reminded that they are quite insignificant in the scope of the larger conflict that is slowly closing its jaws around the Seven Kingdoms.  The failing of the books is that Martin exhausted the interest of the machinations well before he was prepared to drop the hammer.  The series did not fall into this trap.   It elided all that boring crap.  Now there’s a question of whether it can execute the finale without Martin’s source material.   This week is the first time I’ve felt optimistic about the prospect.